Poster by: Mark Byron, ARC Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Sydney.

The scholarly editing of modernist literary texts took a sharp turn with the publication of Hans Walter Gabler's genetic edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1984. This landmark edition, and the critical storm that it generated, acutely illustrated two related propositions: that new developments in scholarly editing were needed to adequately describe avant garde texts of the early twentieth century; and that a limit of the paper-based edition had been reached, requiring new technologies to be embraced in the production of future scholarly editions.

My ARC Discovery postdoctoral project aims to create an electronic edition of Samuel Beckett’s notoriously knotty text, Watt, in which the published text and its complicated manuscript archive (of over 1200 pages) are established in a highly reticulated network of documents and links. This arrangement, only feasible in electronic form, provides the technical basis by means of which new concepts in editing theory and practice are tested and defined: namely, an extension beyond both genetic and social text editing theories, into a zone where Beckett’s text-archive manifold can be adequately displayed and understood. I will outline the theory behind this editorial innovation and show how it works in a demonstration of the edition-in-progress.